BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 – Have you tried it?
As you may know, SP1 for BizTalk 2006 R2 was released about a week ago. Reading the BizTalk Server Team blog, it sounds quite impressive – like an update I would surely want on my servers. However, in troubleshooting with Microsoft a problem I have with performance on one of our servers, the gentleman I worked with recommended I not install it – at least not yet. That puzzled me a bit. He indicated that he had one customer who installed it, and after having a problem, was having trouble reversing (uninstalling) the service pack.
So I thought it’d be interesting to get your opinion on SP1. Have you installed it? Did you have any trouble? Did you notice any of the benefits described by the product team? Let me know how well your experience went.
[Update as of 8-Feb-2010]:
One of the Microsoft Escalation Engineers read my post and wanted me to feel certain that there aren’t any issues with the installation of SP1 for BizTalk 2006 R2. Apparently the only “issue”, if you can call it that, is that the DB schema changes with SP1, so if a rollback was required, it is more complicated because the database needs to be restored to a time point pre-Sp1. I guess I should add that the uninstallation is not supported by Microsoft either. I’d certainly read through the SP1 Installation Guide though before starting the upgrade process. There’s a lot to check before installing.
Because SP1 sounds like it has a lot of improvements I’m going to have SP1 installed on our servers soon – I’ll post an update once that happens (it will take a few weeks to get this into production).
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Victor Fehlberg's Tech Postings 
Greetings, Victor.
As a BTS 2009 developer, this article caught my attention. I’m wondering, with BizTalk server 2009 already out for a while, and 2009 R2 on the TAP, isn’ 2006 R2 getting redundant?.
I used to work for a company, who would not even buy 2006 R2, becaue of cost and license issues, and many are jumping to BizTalk 2009, or are wait for Oslo / Dublin.
I think this product is now too late, and at the wrong time.
Any opinion on this?.
Cheers,
I suppose the rationale for releasing 2006 R2 SP1 is that there are still a large number of companies using 2006 R2, perhaps even a majority.
If a company has the opportunity to choose, I’d certainly try and go with the latest available product – I think the 2009 R2 release is around the corner and sounds like an important next step. If a company could wait, I’d try to wait for 2009 R2.
From what I’ve read/heard about Oslo/Dublin, they aren’t really positioned to compete with BizTalk, so I probably wouldn’t recommend that anyone wait for those as a replacement for a BizTalk solution unless they have a very small integration need.
Service Packs cost nothing. If you’re lacking a SA agreement then upgrading BizTalk from 2006 to 2009 is license heavy.
x1 server down – all fine (orphaned spool messages dropped from 2000 to 18). x2 servers currently in pieces with a screwed up install. Go figure…
Installed BizTalk Server 2006 R2 – Service Pack 1 (SP1). Blogged my experience here..
http://indway-is.blogspot.com/2010/02/installed-biztalk-server-2006-r2.html
Cheers
M.R.ASHWINPRABHU
Thank you for sharing your experience! Hopefully most of the hotfixes one has installed won’t be required after the update since they’ve been wrapped into SP1, but it’s certainly a good idea to know what they were ahead of time so that one can double check.
I agree that BizTalk 2009 is out for a while, but for solutions involving multiple interfaces with external customers migration can be a very costly activity.
Who will pay for all the additional testing by all customers after the migration etc.
A migration is not that easy/logical when it involes a large scale production environment and SP1 might then be the next best thing.
I agree entirely. That is certainly the reason we haven’t migrated, nor will we. Instead we’ll probably bring up a new environment for 2009 R2 and run 2006 R2 separately.
Thank you for your feedback, especially Alastair. Victor, I am waiting for your post about the result in production.
Thanks for the reminder. We are installing into production this Friday. We installed SP1 into our test environment on the 26th of February and things are running pretty smooth. Here are a couple of things we found. SP1 breaks the ability to configure WCF-Oracle send ports (I’m going to write a post on this very soon). However, there’s a workaround to use WCF-Custom send ports and simply use the OracleBinding within them. Also, this list came in handy: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974563. It seems that bug 943165 re-appeared after SP1 when restarting 32-bit host instances, but supposedly that was included in SP1, so I’ll look into that some more. Maybe it’s a different issue.
I should add that it breaks WCF-SQL send ports too.
Hi,
I installed BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 on our DEV environment and we are now experiencing database perfomance problems.
It seems that BizTalkMsgBoxDb.dbo.MsgBoxPerfCounters_GetHostInstancesNumber_ it taking up most of our database CPU time.
Is this the behavior mentioned in bug 943165 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943165/)
Did you manage to solve this?
I don’t believe this behavior is caused by 943165. When you installed SP1, did you do so with an account that has dbowner permissions on the database? We accidentally installed SP1 on some servers without doing that (the account was an administrative account on the app server, but not the database) and we ran into some performance problems as a result. What SQL Server are you using? What service packs does it have?
Hi Victor,
I applied the 943165 after having installed SP1 and we saw an improvement in the database performance.
The person who has done the installation was not sysadmin on the Db.
What to do next? Re-apply SP1?
We are using SQL Server 2005. I’ll have to ask for the applied service packs.
Kind Regards,
Koen
Hi Victor,
indeed the 943165 did not fix the issue.
What did do to fix the SQL performance problem?
Kind Regards,
Koen
In my case we re-installed SP1 using the correct account and that fixed our issue.
Well i have hadmy first experience now with SP1.
Disassembling a in a receive pipeline won’t work anymore …
Have a read here : http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/wellink/archive/2010/03/19/biztalk-2006-r2-sp1-gt-something-changed-in-disassembling-pipelines.aspx
Well just did some additional testing and SP1 definitely broke the Disasembling capabillities of BT 2006. Have a read here : http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/wellink/archive/2010/03/19/biztalk-2006-r2-sp1-alters-the-disassembling-behaviour-of-a-receive-pipeline.aspx
still i see WCF-SQL send ports Issue..no errors and no data insert just hangs and when you restart hostinstence it will work as it is…
We have installed BizTalk 2006 R2 SP1 on the 15th of February. Since this day, we are experiencing a strange issue with the BizTalk Framework 2.0 (BTF 2.0): the service instances are not removed from the Administration console, even if the reliable receipt (RR) are successfully received. The messages are not sent several times as soon as the RR are received, but the service instances ending with an error message stating: “The reliable BTF message exhausted all retry attempts without receiving an acknowledgement.”
MS support team is working on this issue, but I am still waiting for the fix…
Hi Etienne, what adapter is being used with the messages that have this issue?